‘I would have just loved to have played in the inside line, when he was outside at 11,’ mused Moran.

McDonald in his prime playing quarter-back, combining with Moran in his Player of the Year pomp of 2017, is what Mayo fantasies are made of. Had it happened for real, All-Irelands would have been made, too.

They did share those three years together and for one memorable afternoon, held centre-stage as they took down Dublin in a thrilling 2006 All-Ireland semi-final.

Moran came off the bench that afternoon famously staying true to his promise to manager Mickey Moran that he would find the net.

In normal circumstances, the sub who comes off the bench to score his team’s only goal in a one-point All-Ireland semi-final victory gets to own the narrative, but McDonald had a way of stealing shows that were not even his.

It was McDonald who would angle over the winning score in front of Hill 16 at the death, but it was his point much earlier in the game that summed up his genius.

Ten minutes in, he faced up to a sideline kick around 25 metres out on the Cusack Stand side and split the posts with what felt like a golf drive as much as a kick.

It followed a similar arc to Maurice Fitzgerald’s famous score against Dublin in 2001, but then he was blessed with much the same skillset.

Yet, for all kinds of reasons, it is hard to imagine McDonald as a coach, mainly given his aversion to convention.

He looked as different as he played; tanned, blonde, pony-tailed, tatted up, easier to picture with a surfboard than a football.

And he was his own man. In the latter stages of a 14-year inter-county career that came to a rather acrimonious end when he was excluded from the Mayo panel, he regularly absented himself from early-season duty.

Not in the habit of explaining himself to the media, his job in the family pipe-laying business and problematic back issues which dogged the latter stage of his career offered context.

The fear that it might have been interpreted as indifference probably prompted him to make his disaffection public when he was cut by John O’Mahony in 2008, but as his extended career with Crossmolina would suggest, he cared deeply about the game.

Perhaps, the main reason it is hard to imagine him as a coach is the things he could do with a ball.

They went beyond manuals and drills, and are impossible to impart to those less gifted.

But his work in the Mayo academy where he looked after the under-15s would suggest otherwise, and it has been reported that Horan on his return as manager had invited him into the Westerners’ management team last year.

Perhaps, it is to address an imbalance in which the bulk of the coaching credit has always been on the defensive side, not least during Donie Buckley’s watch.

The expectation, not unlike Padraic Joyce’s arrival in Galway, is that his influence will see Mayo, whose running game has always been their primary weapon of choice, become a more kicking-oriented team, which would be timely in the summer of the advanced mark.

The likelihood is that it will be more nuanced and will focus on working with younger forwards such as Tommy Conroy, Gary Boylan, James Carr, Ryan O’Donoghue, Paul Towey and Jordan Flynn in facilitating their development.

It is an opportunity those players should relish, with even Moran admitting that, had he realised his former teammate was coming on board, it would have given him food for thought as to whether his retirement announcement last August was premature.

‘I probably still would have, but it would have definitely put a question mark over it because I idolised the man for so long.

‘The mercurial talent that he had, in terms of things he could do on the pitch. I always thought he could see the picture of what was happening before it actually happened.’

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